The Truth Of The Matter
by Jemmiah
Summary: A game of truth or dare reveals some hidden secrets for the crew of Scorpio...


TITLE: The truth of the Matter

By Jemmiah

"It's nearly empty."

Nobody was paying the slightest attention to him but if he was honest with himself that was hardly what Vila would have called an earth-shattering revelation. There they were, sat around the table in the main lounge area of Xenon base's hideaway, playing what looked to be a rather embarrassing game suggested by the perpetually curious Dayna called 'Truth or Dare'. The only problem that Vila could see was that nobody was actually brave enough to pick dare: that coupled with the fact that nobody could tell whether or not their questions were being answered truthfully.

"Speak to yourself Vila." The thief muttered, picking up a glass decanter and regarding with dismay the lack of alcohol remaining within the lockable cupboards. The more he squinted at the darkened shelves the more certain he was there had been a further eight more flagons of Dorian's wine stored within - at least there had been last evening. As he unstopped the vessel he turned one ear to the game. Avon, of course, had blithely ignored the opportunity to get to know his comrades a little better. He was all too aware of everyone's many defects and had no wish to discover any further disagreeable traits that might be lurking beneath their collective stupidity. So saying, he had slunk off to his room and left the younger, easily bored members of the group to while away the hours in pointless indolence.

Dayna and Soolin wore the predatory grins of people who were trying to set somebody up for a fall, and by default that individual had to be Tarrant, seeing as how Vila had abdicated his place in the game soon after they had asked him which of the two of them he thought was prettier. Faced with upsetting a lady gunslinger and a weapon designer, who could easily use him for target practice, Vila had taken the cowards way out and went to find himself a suitably large drink by way of calming his nerves.

As for Tarrant, he was well aware of Soolin and Dayna's little game and wore the confident, easy air of a man who really didn't care less what they asked him.

"Okay, Tarrant." Dayna was saying, leaning forward with her arms rested on the table surface. "Truth or dare?"

"Truth!" Tarrant smirked. "At least I know what to expect from your questions. Your dares are another matter."

"Ohhhh?" Soolin almost purred back. "Scared, are we?"

"Where you two are concerned, most definitely."

Soolin replied by flicking her long, silver-blonde hair backward away from her face. "So you should be."

Dayna's face puckered impishly for a moment, considering what question was most likely to make her friend squirm. She drummed her fingers against the table surface in a vain attempt to intimidate Tarrant and rattle his all too unshakeable confidence, but to no real affect.

"Okay." She said finally. "I want the name of the first girl you ever kissed - and I want the gory details too!" Dayna added, pointing a warning finger at Tarrant just to let him know she wasn't about to let him off the hook. Tarrant seemed only mildly perturbed by the question, frowning slightly.

"It would be ungentlemanly of me to name names." Tarrant offered eventually, smiling at the jeers that met his response. "However, I will say that I was 14 years old at the time, and that the young lady in question developed the annoying habit of moping about and following me around like a loyal guard dog for months afterwards. And all because of a silly cadet prank in a game not at all dissimilar to the one we are playing now." His smile contorted into a grimace at the memory. "Which is precisely why I'm not asking for dare!"

"Scared AND suspicious!" Soolin crowed. "I think we've got his measure."

"And you're not going to goad me into saying dare." Tarrant smiled angelically back at her, fluttering his dark lashes. "

"What," Dayna cooed at him, "even if I dared you to kiss Soolin?"

"I don't trust you not to change the dare once I'd agreed to it." Tarrant remarked honestly. "I told you, I know what you're like."

Vila rolled his eyes. Tarrant was becoming as suspicious as Avon - and frankly the idea of living with two Avons was more than he could take. In fact he couldn't think of anything worse than living with two Avons…unless perhaps it was three Avons. Sniffing the wine like a connoisseur, savouring the fruity aroma for a moment, his concentration was snapped suddenly away from puzzling the stores dramatic and disturbing depletion of alcohol by Soolin's:

"Not even if I dared you to kiss Dayna?"

Tarrant was instantly dismissive. "I've already kissed Dayna."

"When was this?!?" Vila exclaimed, surprised.

The three of them looked up to face him.

"Still there, are we?" Dayna teased him mercilessly. "I thought you'd abandoned the game. Or found a suitable cupboard to hide in. I won't forget," her dark eyes scanned his face in mock outrage, "that you picked Soolin over me. I have a lonnnnnng memory, Vila."

"Yes, well nevermind that." Vila became flustered, desperate to change the subject. "What I want to know is when you kissed Tarrant. I didn't know about this!"

"Neither did I!" Soolin interlaced her fingers, greatly interested. "Is there any gossip I should know about?"

Tarrant regarded Dayna impassively for a moment. "There's not much to tell, really. It was whilst we were visiting Ultraworld. You know what it's like: boy meets girl, girl meets boy…aliens meet boy and girl. Before you know it, you've a gun against your head and you're locking lips with a half-crazed female who for reasons best known to herself likes to hide explosive devices in her teeth! I didn't dare try it again for fear of finding out where she keeps her grenades…owch!" Tarrant yelped, sliding away from Dayna's pinching attack against his body. "Not that it wasn't agreeable!" He added in hope of appeasing her wrath.

Soolin shook her head in bewilderment. Although she had been regaled with various tales of the Liberator crew's past exploits the intriguing events on Ultraworld had not been amongst the information divulged. Vila took a quick swallow of his wine, his face rapidly twisting with disgust.

"This isn't wine!" He set the glass down before him and eyed it malevolently, almost as if it had contained one hundred percent pure glycolene. "This is…this is just berry juice!"

"Soolin." Tarrant issued the fair-haired woman with his most disarming smile. "Truth or dare?"

"Truth! You don't think I trust you either, do you?"

"Very well. Perhaps," he folded his arms confidently, "You'd like to tell Vila who replaced the wine stocks with berry juice?"

Soolin turned to the young woman seated opposite her. "Dayna did." She replied with a nod of her head.

"Why?!?" Vila cried out in utter disbelief.

"Because you drink too much of it. Because in the past seven months you have ravaged the supplies like a termite through wood. Because alcohol is full of sugar, which is difficult to burn off, and turns to fat which means the next time Soolin or myself have to haul your overweight carcass out of an iced-over spacecraft that has no functioning life support facilities we might have to leave you behind!" Dayna's teasing became more pointed, underlain with hidden menace.

"But it's there to be enjoyed!" Vila protested. "It exists only to be drunk!"

"You exist only to be drunk." Tarrant rejoined, taking up where Dayna had left off.

"Very funny." The thief's voice was tinged with sarcasm. "I can get this sort of rubbish from Avon without having to take it from you as well. And just who," Vila allowed his voice to rise indignantly, "reset the code on the locks? It took me three whole minutes to bypass the new combination!"

"Too difficult, was it?" Tarrant asked sweetly. "Or was it the prospect of work that didn't appeal to you?" He glanced at Soolin. "It's your turn next, I think."

Soolin nodded. "Dayna, truth or dare?"

"Truth."

"Just to put Vila's neurosis to rest, who re-set the code on the wine cabinet?"

"Avon." Dayna gave a slight little shrug of her shoulders as if to show it didn't really matter to her one way or the other. "I don't think he believed for a second it would keep you out of there, Vila. But he did mutter something about 'making that lazy incompetent think for perhaps only the second time in his worthless existence.' Or something along those lines."

"I think the word used was imbecile, not incompetent." Tarrant remarked with typical relish, enjoying the look of chagrin that had spread across Vila's features like an uncontrollable rash. "But I supposed the gist of it is there."

"And," Vila wasn't through with complaining just yet, not when he was just getting into the swing of things, "the supplies are running low! That's if any of it is actually alcohol and not this filthy berry muck you're supplementing it with."

Dayna grinned. "Tarrant," she asked the young pilot, "truth or dare?"

"Truth."

Mellanby rubbed her hands with undisguised glee.

"Perhaps you'd like to tell Vila what you did with the remainder of the wine supplies?"

Tarrant suddenly looked a lot less smug than he had before.

"Could I have dare, please?" He begged Dayna with a flash of large, blue eyes.

"Uh, uh! Not a chance…at least not until you tell Vila what you did with his wine. Come on now: don't be shy!" She pinched the handsome pilot on his cheek. "Tell him that you hid it where he'd never think of looking."

Vila mouth hung slackly as he awaited Tarrant's confession.

"Well…"Tarrant began somewhat uncertainly, "We did feel…"

"Ahem!" Soolin coughed pointedly.

"Okay, I felt that you were using too much of the wine for your own good. We wouldn't like to see you drop dead with sclerosis of the liver, now would we?"

"Your concern is really touching. Now get to the important bit!" Vila demanded.

"Added to the fact that you weren't exactly sharing it out evenly." Dayna added. "Call us old fashioned, but one glass for Avon, one for Tarrant, one for Soolin, one for Dayna and ten bottles for Vila doesn't exactly strike us as particularly fair…"

"I get stressed!" Vila countered anxiously.

"You get whammed, more like." Soolin drawled.

"…And so we decided that we ought to take stock of what we have by way of supplies." Continued Tarrant, sounding more and more unsure of himself with every moment that passed."

"You poured it away!" Vila all but wailed. "Didn't you!"

"No of course not!" Tarrant sighed, exasperated at Vila's almost permanent need for alcohol by way of an emotional crutch. "I, er…I put it in the basement. Where it will be safe."

Soolin wasn't sure she'd ever seen anyone's eyes so wide before in her entire life. Tarrant had certainly chosen the one place on the base where Vila would never willingly venture, not after that nasty business with the gestalt beast in the underground cavern that had almost killed the lot of them. Some people kept the strangest of pets, it was true, but Dorian's nasty little surprise in the chamber had gone beyond the label 'exotic species' and well into the downright illegal area! Even Tarrant himself hadn't relished making the journey into the hidden vault and he was about the least superstitious person Soolin knew. Vila, on the other hand, was easily frightened unless too drunk to panic - and the only way for him to become too drunk to panic was to venture into the cavernous darkness and retrieve his wine…

Vila walked unbelievingly up to Tarrant and stopped a few feet from him.

"You always said you wanted a wine cellar." The curly haired young man said hesitantly. "Well, now you have one…"

Vila stared blankly ahead, not even making eye contact with Tarrant.

"Soolin," the thief said eventually, "Truth or dare?"

"It's not your turn…" Tarrant began.

"Dare." Soolin arched one eyebrow impassively, anticipating Vila's command. Tarrant instinctively began to edge towards the end of the couch.

"I dare you," Vila said imperiously, "as our resident marksperson, to equip your gun with a high-energy stun clip and give Tarrant a right royal kick up the backside…"

The words weren't even out of his mouth when Tarrant performed a one handed vault over the couch and hurled himself towards the doorway, his long legs propelling himself with all due haste out of Soolin's range. He didn't know whether or not the pair of them were bluffing but he wasn't prepared to find out, certainly not where Soolin was concerned. Her aim was far too accurate to gamble upon…

"He's quick!" Soolin commented, much gratified. "Not many people can outrun me!"

But the enraged Vila wasn't even paying attention. He scurried to the doorway and in a twist of irony that wasn't lost on the master lock-picker called after Tarrant:

"_THIEF!!!_"


End file.
